where orders emerge

Forward to the Future

After reading this recent Cafe Hayek post, University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson sent the following e-mail to me – which pleased me greatly, not least because of the excellent substantive policy point he makes in it. (I share the e-mail here, in full, with Todd’s kind permission.)

Don — Great post on how much money it would take you to change places with Rockefeller. I agree. It made me wonder whether the same will be true of our descendants one hundred years from today. I have every reason to believe the answer is yes, although we cannot obviously know in what ways or at exactly what scale. But believing it will be has profound impacts on our current choices. For instance, should we make ourselves poorer today to reduce the risk of environmental change that will only happen then? It seems crazy if the past is prologue.

M. Todd Henderson
Michael J. Marks Professor of Law &
Mark Claster Mamolen Research Scholar
The University of Chicago Law School